5 - The Green Great Game, January 1798–June 1799

Summary

The Security Situation in January 1798

The Wickhams spent nearly two months on their return journey to England, travelling via Frankfurt, where they visited Charles Gregan Craufurd who was still recovering from his wound received at the battle of Amberg. They reached Yarmouth, on the Nautilus, at the end of December and immediately headed for London, where they took up residence at 17 Duke Street in Westminster. As in 1792, there was a new job awaiting Wickham, that of Undersecretary of State at the Home Office, a position with a salary of £1,500 per annum, three times what he was earning when he had left for the Continent in 1794.2 Portland had held this position open since 1795, after Wickham had decided that his future, following his Swiss mission, lay in the Home Office rather than in the diplomatic corps. As he was also to hold the position of Superintendent of Aliens, however, Wickham was to remain heavily involved in foreign intelligence matters over the next eighteen months as well having responsibility for home security.

After making his report to Grenville, Wickham and his wife travelled to Yorkshire to visit his family. While there, at the request of Lord Chancellor Loughborough, he made enquiries about a radical society that had just been set up near Leeds and took soundings from the local gentry. ‘I am upon the whole well satisfied with what I have seen in this country’, he informed Grenville, but warned that the large employers in the manufacturing districts blamed the government for allowing their workers to be influenced by radical ‘mischief ’ that ‘seems to them to come always from London’. By mid-February Wickham was back in the capital, ready to deal with the source of this disaffection. It had, he was soon to discover, a strong green tinge.

The situation had changed considerably since Wickham had last been working at the Alien Office. Following an attack on the King's coach at the opening of Parliament in October 1795, the government had finally decided to reinforce its powers through new legislation.